Social presence: Bridging the divide between teleworking and office-based employees' work experiences

Teleworking has become increasingly popular in today's organizations, but assumptions remain that teleworkers will miss out on workplace experiences afforded by a collocated environment. Based on social information processing theory (Walther, 1992) and other CMC research, this study proposes that a strong sense of social presence (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) will be more important than a physical presence in the office in determining employee work experiences and outcomes. Predicted relationships included: (1) social presence will increase when employees perceive their communication media use as similar to their colleagues'; (2) office employees will rate higher on work experiences such as information exchange, perceived team cohesion, leader-member exchange, perceived politics, and meetings/interruptions, but that this will be moderated by social presence; (3) social presence and work experiences will be stronger predictors of the organizational attitudes of commitment, identification, and turnover intentions than will work environment; and (4) work experiences will mediate the relationships between social presence and organizational attitudes. Data were collected using a web survey (teleworkers, n = 105; office employees, n = 120). Social presence was broken into three factors, representing the level of interactivity, ease of working together, and sensitivity in the work environment. Results showed that perceived similarity to colleagues' use of phone and email was related to higher levels of social presence, but the communication media hypothesis was primarily not supported. Office employees reported more frequent information exchange and more stress from meetings/interruptions than teleworkers. Social presence was significantly related to all of the work experiences, but did not moderate the relationship between work environment and work experiences. Both social presence and work experiences were more strongly related to attitudes than was work environment. Several mediation tests were also significant, with team cohesion and politics as the strongest mediators between social presence and organizational attitudes. In general, teleworkers reported significantly greater commitment and turnover intentions as compared to office-based employees, but work environment was not significantly related to identification. Overall, results support the importance of social presence in determining employee work experiences and attitudes, and reveal positive results for teleworkers.